In a manufacturing plant or other facility in which it is desirable to monitor the operational condition of machines and other assets, machine performance data is typically collected and stored in a database. A longstanding limitation of storing machine data in a database has been that the data is typically stored only in association with plant hierarchy nodes, such as machine nodes that identify machine locations within the plant. As a result, if a machine is moved to another location in the plant hierarchy, the data collected for that machined continues to be associated only with the original location. Thus, the data did not follow the machine to its new location in the plant.
What is needed, therefore, is a method for associating asset performance data with (1) the location of the asset at the time the data was collected and (2) the actual asset itself, such that, if an asset is moved to a new location, the data is referenced both to the old location and to the asset.